WisCARES, a collaborative project between the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Social Work and School of Veterinary Medicine, provides social services to homeless people in Dane County while also providing basic veterinary care for their pets.

WisCARES received a free 6 month lease from St. Vincent de Paul as a trial period for the new clinic, which will be the program’s first space of its own.

Master’s students in the School of Social Work will be also have the opportunity to get practical experience by working in the clinic, providing social services to homeless clients.

“Having our own space really allows for us to begin the professional collaboration and training program, particularly for social work students,” said Maurice Gattis, WisCARES co-founder and assistant professor of social work.

The new location at 1312 Culmen Street will expand veterinary medical walk-in clinics, as well as act as a pet food pantry and office space to meet with clients for appointments and case management services. The program’s current clinic locations at the Salvation Army at 630 E. Washington Ave. and the...

In his new book, Browsing Through My Candy Store: Selected Reflections of a Policy Wonk, School of Social Work Professor Emeritus Tom Corbett, Ph.D., reaches out to current policy students and policymakers with reflections upon, and advice from, his career in social policy.

Corbett tells of the challenges and joys he had in tackling policy issues and working to create a more just society in a thoughtful and humorous narrative that hits on the different issues as if they are counters at his own “policy candy store.”

“In my experience, a lot of young promising policy types shy away from the challenges because they assume that doing policy will be as dry and boring as waiting for paint to dry or watching a curling match,” Corbett says in the preface. “This book should paint a very different picture of what policy is all about....

UW-Madison alumna Laura Klunder’s (BSW '06, MSW '07) newest tattoo runs down the inside of her left forearm and reads “K85-160,” a number that dates to her infancy. Klunder was 9 months old when her South Korean mother left her at a police station in Seoul. The police brought her to Holt Children’s Services, a local adoption agency, where a worker assigned Klunder the case number K85-160. It was only two weeks into 1985, but she was already the 160th child to come to the agency that month, and she would go on to be one of 8,800 children sent overseas from South Korea that year. Klunder became part of the largest adoption exodus from one country in history...

Professor Maurice Gattis, in collaboration with two UW-Madison Communication Arts professors and GSAFE, created the Safe Schools for Wisconsin’s Transgender Youth project to research the experiences of gender-nonconforming youth in Wisconsin public schools.

Ultimately, the researchers would like to see the creation and implementation of school nondiscrimination policies at the statewide level for trans* and gender-nonconforming youth, to work with the schools to implement the policies, and then to assess the implementation.

“My hope is that the results of the study will inform conversations regarding policies and practices that will create meaningful change for full inclusion of transgender and gender-nonconforming students in schools throughout the state, as well as inform the development of best practices for policy formulation and implementation,” Gattis says.

Alumnus Roy Campbell, second from right, answers phones at an Easter Seals telethon in the 1980's, where he spent his career working to provide innovative programming for individuals with disabilities

Roy Campbell, the first male graduate of the master’s program at the UW-Madison School of Social Work, passed away on December 19, 2014 at age 88. He was one of the first students to receive a graduate degree after the school became accredited by the Council on Social Work Education in 1952.

Born in Ewen, Michigan, a small town in the Upper Peninsula, Roy was a pilot during World War II. Following...!pilot>